Mike Trout is already worth his contract extension

He’s easily the best player in the world, and it’s not even close. While so-called “analysts” and “experts” try to proclaim someone else as the next king every so often, Mike Trout has been doing his own thing.

But we had always known he was going to be good from the very beginning, prompting one of Dipoto’s greatest successes as the Angels GM: signing Mike Trout to a six year, $144.5 million contract, which would keep Trout in an Angels uniform through the 2020 season.

Trout was willing to do this because 1) he would have only earned $500k as a pre-arbitration player, therefore wanting some long-term security, and 2) he would still hit free agency in his age-29 season and still land another big contract later down the road.

But more importantly for the Angels, it bought out three years of Mike Trout, keeping him around for 2018, 2019, and 2020; It’s also three years of seeing Trout not play for another team. This was quite a small cost to keep a franchise cornerstone around for a longer time, and there were many saying this at the time. So here we are two years through the deal, and the extension has sure paid off already.

Fangraphs estimates to find Trout’s production on the free agent market (based on market value), a team would have to pay worth $71.7M and $74.9M each of the last two years. The total extension itself is $144.5M and Trout has surpassed that with his production already! And he’s not even in his prime...

There’s really no limit to what Trout can do. And anything he does over the next four years is just icing on the cake. Enjoy it while you can, Angels fans, because most great things don’t last forever.